Everything you need to know about running and life and any other random crap I find bouncing through my mind like a ping pong ball. And always be sure your shoes are happy.

Archive for the tag “Zombie Cat”

I have about 839 things I could be doing right now. What do you think? Do something? Clean house? Fold laundry? Post memberships?

Hold on – I’m thinking. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Wi8Fv0AJA4 (for those of you who want to sing along, here are the lyrics: doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo DO dado doo! doodoodoodoodoo doo doo DO dado do do do. do. dooooo)

Nah, they all just lost. I’m going to write and stare out the window at the lake.

I am apparently turning into my Grandma Alice. Except she was a very sweet person, so that part I did not get. If she ever said a cuss word I think the entire surrounding South Dakota community would have sunk into the earth forever, leaving a gaping crater. Crater Alice they would call it, and shake their heads sadly at the memory. All those innocent lives, lost, because Alice one day looked up and said, Well. Sh*t.

My Grandfather, John, lost all but the last joint of one of his fingers in a farming accident. When we were little we would say, “Oh, Grandpa! How did your finger get cut off!?” and he would reply, “Your grandmother got mad at me and cut it off with the kitchen knife!” and we’d look at sweet Grandma Alice and say, “GRANDMA!” in horror. She’d just shake her head and murmur, “Oh, John.” in a sweet little voice.

Maybe she was so sweet because she ate so much sugar. She lived to 103, never had any health problems except colon cancer in her nineties which they removed and was never a problem again, and I think 1/2 a blood pressure pill. But that woman ate sugar all day long. Breakfast: cinnamon roll, coffee. Or coffee cake and coffee. Or toast and jam and coffee (and she put extra sugar in the bread recipe). Two hours later it was time for coffee and a cookie, or piece of cake or whatever. Repeat throughout the day. Sugar in the coleslaw, sugar in the potato salad, she even put sugar in the jar of dill pickles. One day we were visiting and my children watched in fascination as she spread butter on a saltine, opened a sugar packet, sprinkled it on top and ate the cracker with her coffee. She was ticked because the nursing home didn’t have any cookies out that morning.

She existed on about 6 hours of sleep, out of bed before the sun in order to get breakfast on for everyone out milking the cows in the freezing dark, but she could power nap like a champ. Grandma would lie down after lunch, close her eyes, pop back up 10-15 minutes later and get moving like Robocop the rest of the day. Herded five kids and a farmer all over the farm most of her life, put up her own veggies, used a wringer washer for I don’t know how long, worked her veggie garden, gathered eggs. Me: I’m pretty tired right now, Facebook can Wear. You. Out.

Today I woke at 4am – and 4 or 4:30am is seeing my face a lot more lately, not that I’m happy about it. Probably Grandma Alice wasn’t either. I do get a lot of work done then, like she did, only different. I answer all my emails that crazy people send me in the night and later the runners or the Board members reply: WTH were you doing checking email at 4:13am?? Coffee – lots of it. But no sugared saltines, thank you anyway. After I got up at 4am and drank half a pot of coffee I met my friend, Speedy Gonzalette, at the track and did a tempo run. That was fun. I’ve never done that before. Funny how you can call something that sucked like an egg sucking dog “fun” but it was. Other than all that sweat burning my eyes. And the gasping for air. And the skyrocketing HR. Aside from that, definitely fun. After lunch, however, I was crashing so I laid down for a minute or sixty. Grandma Alice Power Nap on ‘roids!!

I will point out that I deserve to be tired; in addition to the 6.5 today, yesterday I ran 2 miles, worked out with Killer (who is getting better, by the way, but she’s gonna be laid up for a few weeks) for an hour, then later worked in the yard in the CODE PURPLE Memphis air for an hour. Didn’t actually ever know there was a code purple but by dingydangy there is. (See? trying to be sweet like Grandma). I thought Code Orange was the best you could hope for.

Whee!!!! I kinda went somewhere in my brain for a few minutes, looking at it. Let’s do that again!

(40 minutes later)

O. KAY. That was more fun than a tempo run. How are you doing? And who am I?

Probably all the blood loss didn’t help, that’s probably why I’m tired and lost my focus there for a fewforty minutes. Cattila the Hun has been decorating my arms with her dagger like, razor-tipped claws until they look like a completed jigsaw puzzle. I think most of the time she doesn’t mean to, but she reaches out and there they are and there I am and SLASH I look like a horror movie. This morning she got one claw hung up in my shirt and couldn’t get it out. I’ve known for a couple of weeks I needed to do something about this issue. I thought about it for a while and decided ignoring it would be my first option. Obviously that failed. Then I considered trimming them myself. That was an Epic Fail resulting in two trimmed claws for her and considerable blood loss for me. I can take her in to the vet any time between 8-noon and 2-5pm without an appointment but I kept putting it off because it’s nearly 20 minutes each way and the non-stop howling mewing kind of gets on my nerves after a couple of seconds. This morning, however, I remembered my secret weapon: the pheromones (story here, in case you forgot). I got out the cat carrier, spritzed a bit of kitty happy pheromones around it and when I picked her up and took her to the carrier she popped right into that sucker without a peep. She mewed most of the way but it wasn’t that ear shattering, incessant, tornado siren pitch. And on the way home she just mewed a few times and gazed up through the skylight, rather like she was looking at an Air Quality Chart. I’m telling you: They have got to figure out Happy Teenager pheromones. They’d make a hundred bamillion bucks.

Murph T. Dog, however, snorts at pheromones. He don’t need no stinking pheromones. The world, to Murphy, is a wonderland.

DUCKS! BARK!

SQUIRRELS! DEATH TO SQUIRRELS!

LAKE! SWIM!

If we open the car door – even only to retrieve the groceries – he’s IN. Car = Love. He’ll sit in the car with the door open and hubs listening to NPR blaring on the car radio for the entire neighborhood’s enjoyment for two, three hours while hubs works outside. True love. Dad, and a car.

Ok, I’m back. Today I’m going to blog about being back in the saddle again.

But first I have to tell you both something. I feel kinda bad about it, but I didn’t know. You know how it is, you try to be the best mom you can be but sometimes you just miss the signs. The poor little things are trying desperately to tell you something but you miss the clues and just assume something that might not even be true. So I have to tell you that maybe I misjudged little Chunker and maybe she isn’t turning into a Zombie Cat after all.

Probably I misjudged her because I was looking at her actions and not understanding the possible cause(s). But she’s been kind of a bad girl lately and I just assumed it was her own fault. Finally I decided I needed to look into things, and I googled it. I figure, if google doesn’t know the answer, no one knows the answer and we’re all going to die. Not that I’m a fatalist or anything. I do think there are things we can do that are not just left to fate.

For instance, one thing you can do that is not just left to fate is load and unload the dishwasher. If you think about it, the dishes are never going to load themselves so you can either believe it is predetermined that dishes will never get washed thus assuming dishes will always be dirty and in the sink (and the corollary, dishes that are clean in the dishwasher will never put themselves away and will always be clean and in the dishwasher) (which, if you think about it, thus turns the dishwasher into a cupboard) (which is very weird to think about. If the dishwasher is thus a cupboard, then where is the dishwasher?).

I’m really confused. Where was I?

Oh, yeah, loading the dishwasher. One thing that surprised me recently is the discovery that my mother, the woman of ‘all things washable are washed immediately and put away immediately’ and…well, there is no and. It’s gonna be done, now, by you (meaning, me). I’ll tell you how bad it was: I grew up in a home without a dishwasher. Yes. I know you are shocked, horrified and dismayed, but there it is. I’m outed. I had dishpan hands at the age of 8. So anyway, my mom, who in my childhood had half the dishes in the kitchen sink before dinner was even over … now leaves her dishes in the sink for however long she feels like it. MAYBE EVEN UNTIL LATER IN THE DAY. I’ll repeat that. MY MOM DOES NOT DO HER DISHES IMMEDIATELY DURING OR AFTER EATING.

You can imagine how my world crumbled. The foundation upon which everything was laid: dust. Do you understand? IF YOU DO NOT DO THE DISHES IMMEDIATELY YOU WILL NOT DIE.

This means that if I do not do the dishes – and I’m trying to comprehend this myself, so hang with me while I try to make it very clear to both of us – again I state, I will NOT DIE.

This means that I could possibly have been mistaken when I got a little testy about dirty cups left on the counter once (here) and maybe was a bit sharp in pointing out how dishwashers work (here). This also must mean (I can’t believe I’m typing this, the only grace left is that none of my children read my blog so they will never know I admitted this) I. Could.

However, it also still means that I’m the one left putting the dishes into and out of the dishwasher, only now I get to do it at my own home and at my mother’s, unless I don’t mind looking at them in the sink for most of the day. Not for the first time I realize: I am my mother. I don’t want to look at the dishes in the sink.

My sweet little Chunker just jumped into my lap while I’m typing this. She’s all warm and soft and purring, and she did not even try to bite me. Not once. And she slept with me last night and didn’t sleep on my head. Close to it, but not on it.

Oh, that reminds me, I was going to tell you about Chunk. Anyway, I googled the issues and realized we might have a problem. I called the Vet who said to come on over which meant she got crammed into the Box of Terror, which then got put in the bigger Box of Terror which has wheels, and from there got taken into the Room of Terror, where the horrid man in the white lab coat said reassuringly, it’s OK little kitty while he crammed a thermometer up her – oh, never mind, Chunk doesn’t want me to talk about that part, sorry. Anyway, the thermometer went where they are want to go. Then she got two needles full of steroids and antibiotics shoved into her booty and then was crammed back into the Box of Terror where the process outlined above was repeated in reverse order.

When she got home she was very surprised and intrigued by the little spray can the horrid man in the white lab coat had given me, which, when sprayed lightly around the room made little happy pheromones float about. The happy pheromones made Chunker feel all calm and zen and she began to regret her previous actions even though at the time she was just a very distraught little kitty who didn’t know where mom had gone for three weeks. Not that Murph hadn’t tried to tell her – he did. He was like, “Chunk, you dipshit, chill. I’m chilling. Look, I have the whole bed to myself. Look, now I have the whole couch to myself. Now I have mom’s chair all to myself. We have food, we have water. You even have your own potty. I’m the one holding it all day long until dad gets home. Get over it!” and meanwhile Chunker was apparently running wildly about the house saying “We’re gonna DIE we’re gonna STARVE we’re gonna be ALL ALONE and she’s NEVER COMING BACK and my tummy hurts and I think I need to whizz. HERE. In the den! Now!!”

Apparently the whizzing in the den just made her more distraught which caused distraught pheromones to float about the house in greater and greater amounts the more distraught she became which then turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy of more distraughtness causing even more upset pheromones … and you can see where it all ended up. In the Room of Terror with the bad man and the thermometer.

Fortunately this seems to have a happy ending because the two injections solved the UTI and the pheromones solved the upset. If only they’d invented pheromones when I had four kids in puberty.

Wait. Dammit. I was going to blog about being back in the saddle again. See how you two constantly distract me? Now I can’t, I have to get ready to go run hills with the hubster, which is stupid to say ‘with’ him since I can only stay ‘with’ him for about 20 feet, but anyway, doesn’t that sound like a lot of fun. Maybe I should sniff some of those pheromones.

Sunday morning, it’s beautiful out – and I slept until 7:30 and did not run. So now the world will end, we are all going to die and probably Chunk will chew my toes off in my sleep when she turns into a Zombie Cat.

Actually I do have my suspicions she already has (turned into a Zombie Cat, not that she chewed my toes off, because I can still see them all right now) but that she is currently able to maintain the facade of normalcy for good periods of time.

Along the lines of this digression, after which I will return to our regularly scheduled blogging, I submit for your review and input the picture I managed to get this morning when I accidentally came upon her trying to eat my table. Note the glowing eyes which, the instant I snapped the picture, quit glowing and she looked at me ever so innocently, “Oh, hi.” “Who, me?” “Why, no, not eating the table legs, just um…stretching. Yes, I was stretching.” Below that, the “I’m so innocent” picture. Which is the truth, and which is a lie? Please submit all votes before midnight CST Monday, April 30, 2012. I worry that votes received after that time might be counted by the Zombie(s); I fear I may not have much more than 24-36 hours left. Also, I leave my favorite Smushy Pillow to the hubs who steals it all the time anyway, along with my half of the bed linens which he also always steals. To the children, anything you can find that looks good, take it. Since the fanciest thing we own is one flat screen TV and it’s 19″ and I got it at WalMart for $199.99 plus tax you’ll just have to take your chances on finding anything in the house of great value. I do love you all deeply and somewhere there are some cute baby pics of some of you. Not all of you, I ran out of time. But some. Somewhere. I did truly mean to get them in a photo album at some point in the past 3-1/2 decades. General Hospital was quite good for a number of years, tho, and I got distracted.

Chunk: The Truth or the Lie? V.1

And, Chunk: The Truth or the Lie? V.2

I want both of you to carefully review these photos and let me know which is the truth and which is the dare.

So that’s my story of how I’m worried about Chunker.

In the meantime while I was waiting for these pics to load and then I would get back to our regularly programmed blogging I wanted a snack so I got an orange. A couple of weeks ago while I was out of town the hubs bought some navel oranges at the local unsupermarket (it’s not that great a store, but the salad bar is pretty awesome.) I’ve tried repeatedly this spring to purchase oranges, all of which promised juicy drippy sweetness in the unsupermarket as I squeezed them in a lame attempt to look like I knew what I was doing, trying to ascertain if this was a good orange to purchase. Arriving home, however, my hopes were constantly dashed as one after another was revealed to be dry, pithy and sour. At last I gave up on my search for orange-y vitamin C goodness – until I returned from out of town and found the basket in the kitchen full of yet another load of oranges. Being the innocent believer in goodness that I am, I tried one last time. Peeling the orange revealed a fruit which was deeply, brilliantly orange, a shade of orange making the University of TN football team look pale, dripping with juicy goodness, sweeter than baby kisses. I stood over the sink making involuntary nom nom nom noises while I shoved the orange in my face, juice running off my elbows into the sink below. Hubs arrived home to the wreckage, orange peels everywhere, Murph the Wonder Dog stuck in one spot, his paws unfortunately glued to the floor in dried orange juice, and me in a stupor slavering over the last delectable section of the last orange. “Fwhere didshu get fthese ornjuzz?” I managed to gasp, trying not to look guilty and shoving the last bit of orange behind my back.

“At the store,” he replied, looking vaguely confused. No, that’s a lie, I’m sorry. He looked completely confused. Why was I asking him about oranges the minute he walked in the door? Was it a trap? Was I going to blame him for the juice all over the floor, even though he was pretty sure he knew it had not been there when he left for work? Or was I going to ask him to pry the dog loose, despite the fact that it was obviously my fault Murph T. Dog was stuck and additionally I’m the only one who can find the mop, for, as Rosie O’Donnell pointed out once (when she used to be funny), apparently the uterus is a homing device.

“They’re so good!” I replied. “Where did you get them??”

“At the local unsupermarket in a great big bag for a dollar.”

Oh, sure. He waltzes in, grabs a big a$$ bag of oranges for a buck and they’re great. I stand there sniffing and squeezing each individual orange at about $32 apiece and my oranges suck.

So anyway, that’s the story of my orange that I just ate. It was really good.

I’ll get back to the regularly scheduled blogging in a minute but first I have to tell you what else happened when I was uploading the pics. I need to tell you both that I am very afraid that Zombies have probably managed to annihilate the staff of Yahoo! News. For days now every time I go to open one of my yahoo email accounts all the highlighted news is THE SAME. It hasn’t changed for DAYS. “Kate’s Princess Transformation” “Angelina and Brad are Engaged” “What Men Find Attractive About Women” (uh, duh – if they’re still breathing) and the one that has been catching my eye, “How Often Should You Change Your Sheets?” which then provides this sinister hint: If you’re only washing them once a month, you could have some unwelcome visitors in your bed.

I’m already having a lot of issues with the whole Zombie thing which is EVERYWHERE now – more on that in a minute – and suddenly I learn that if I don’t wash my sheets I could have Unwelcome Visitors In My Bed, and I don’t think they’re talking about the guys they interviewed about finding women attractive, none of whom, I’m sure, had an entire set of their original teeth and probably drive a ’74 greenyellowred pickup truck with a bumper sticker proudly announcing that you should definitely not pass on the driver’s side ‘cuz Ah Chew and Ah Spit. So I am totally washing my sheets. Right. Now. Then I thought, well, I should probably wash the comforter too. I grabbed that fluffy down-filled king-sized sucker, dragged it down two flights of stairs and crammed that baby into the unsuspecting washing machine. Setting it on “Large Load” “Heavy Duty” I fired that little GE baby up and sat down to blog because first, now that I’ve newly committed to not working on the weekends I now have nothing to do, and second I thought you both may have been missing me. I know that you know that I’m there for ya tho – I got your back.

Chunkermunker, however, doesn’t trust me to quite that degree. While waiting for my pics to upload she decided once again to play the innocent and jumped up on my lap. Looking precious and sweet she put her little nose to mine and closed her eyes, her little paw on my shoulder. I can’t do anything with her like that, of course, particularly anything like reach the keyboard and reveal her Zombie Secret to the world but I’m sure that’s not what she was doing. I’m sure she just loves me. Not a whole bunch, but a little bit, I bet. Because at that moment the washing machine went off load with the king-sized comforter full of probably 87 pounds of absorbed water and started trying to walk out of the laundry closet. Which is right next to my office, so the walking thumping pounding washing machine was pretty loud and Chunker looked at me with her eyeballs as big as oranges (really good oranges) and she was under the bed in one half of a nanosecond, leaving me alone to deal with the attacking washer. See how she has my back, how my safety and security are always uppermost in her mind? Murphy would have saved me, I bet, but he was upstairs sound asleep on the newly washed bedding, letting all his little fleas have a picnic in the hills and valleys of the wrinkled sheets.

So that’s my story about that the Yahoo! News staff is probably already Zombies and also what might be in your sheets if you don’t wash them, so don’t blame me if you get eaten tonight by Zombies stuck in your sheets.

In just a minute I’ll get back to the regularly scheduled blogging about getting back in the saddle again, but first you both need to know something else about Zombies. You know the part (above) where I mentioned that the Zombie thing is, like, EVERYWHERE NOW? Wellllll…..I’m pretty sure I maybe be among The Chosen. Maybe you don’t know about The Chosen since I’m sure neither of you are. Chosen, I mean. But when the Zombie Apocalypse comes there will be some of us who are prepared and we will be the ones who have to save the rest of you idiots who act all nice about everything – but I know you don’t really believe me about the Zombies.

This is what happened so that I know I’m one of The Chosen. I was at my mom’s house and the neighbor invited us both to her house for dinner. They’ve only lived there since last fall and my mom was pretty busy the past few months with my dad, so she never really got to meet them other than the times they see each other outside and shout HI! and the time the brother and his friend shoveled all the snow off mom’s driveway which was very nice of them. So we sit down in the dining area and begin visiting with the neighbor and what do I see???? OMG. The Zombie Survival Guide. Right there on the shelf in front of my eyes. Yes! it’s EVERYWHERE NOW. So I know it’s a sign right away and I jump up and say, OH MY GOSH! and they all ducked because maybe they thought I was having a seizure or something and they looked pretty surprised and I shouted ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE IT! YOU HAVE THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE!” and they nodded that they did, indeed, have The Zombie Survival Guide. AND – they let me borrow it! Can you believe that? Something that valuable, and they let me take it out of their home and all the way to Memphis and they didn’t even charge me a deposit.

So that’s my story of how I learned I was one of The Chosen and that it’s all EVERYWHERE. Also, I do have my own copy of the book, I do. But I kinda lost it, maybe.

Now I guess I’ll talk about being back in the saddle some other day because all this worrying and all my efforts to try to make you understand about the Zombies and Chunk and Murph and oranges and being Chosen and washing your bedding has completely worn me out and I’m going to go take a nap. On the couch. Which the Yahoo! News Zombies did not indicate is inhabited by unwanted creatures. Other than Murph and Chunk, of course, who, the minute I thought the word “nap” in a tiny corner of my mind immediately raced each other to the couch, leaving me half a cushion and part of a pillow.